80
LESLIE A.
FIEDLER
look to such recusant Puritans, only the twentieth century was able to
reveal; yet that century revealed, too, how like one half of the older view,
at least, their revision of it remained.
One need only to contrast their point of view with the versions of
Europe and Americans in Europe produced by the quite different kinds
of writer to whom the task of reinventing the two worlds was transferred
in the new century: with those birthright Roman Catholics, for instance,
like F. Scott Fitzgerald in
T ender
is
the Night;
or with those post–
Jamesian urban Jews, like
H.
J.
Kaplan in
The Plenipotentiaries,
or
Bernard Malamud in his Italian stories. Kaplan's novel is almost for–
gotten theS\'! days; but it is well to remember what a revolutionary
reordering of old concepts was involved in the creation of his post–
World War II Americans, Jews and philo-Semites in whose head the
old anti-Semitic tags out of Eliot ("Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein
with
a cigar") echoed with new ironies as they regarded their fellow
tourists in Paris. And it is apt, too, that in his extraordinary short story,
"The Mohammedans," Kaplan let us look for the first time, through
the eyes of precisely such a latter-day expatriate returned to Chicago, at
those Black Muslim who so possess our imaginations now.
The ultimate contrast, however, is with myths of Americans abroad
imagined by those absolutely non-European Americans, the Negroes, best
represented, perhaps, by James Baldwin in his novel,
Giovanni's Room
or his pioneering essay, "A Stranger in the Village." We have had to
travel far, indeed, on a journey for which the only maps are precisely
the books we have been discussing, to get from the Old World of Irving
or Longfellow or Hawthorne or Melville, even of James or Eliot, to stand
in the Europe Baldwin experiences and overhear his musing, as he
watches a group of Swiss villagers: "the most illiterate among them is
related in a way I am not to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo .... the
Cathedral of Chartres says to them what it cannot say to me...."
But this is also true of the most illiterate among the Western Amer–
icans of the mid-nineteenth century, in whose name Mark Twain pre–
tended to speak; fur Twain represents merely the other side of the old
WASP ambival"ence, its secular Puritanism: that fear of High Art and
High Church worship which the followers of Henry Adams had rejected
in favor of the religion of Art. Twain may refuse the Virgin and choose
the Dynamo, but he remains immeasureably closer to the first American
travelers in Europe than any latter-day Am'erican Catholic or Negro or
Jew. Whatever sense of alienation he may feel from Dante, Shakespeare
and Michelangelo, to Shakespeare at least he is bound by a kinship of
blood and tradition he can never quite disavow. To be sure, his rela–
tionship to Michelangelo is more than a little ambivalent, for Michel-
